Five Reasons The Air Force Has Begun Taking Delivery Of Boeing's KC-46A Pegasus Tanker

The U.S. Air Force began accepting Boeing’s KC-46A aerial-refueling tanker this week, a development that it rightly described as “a major milestone for the next-generation tanker.” The program has essentially met all of its key performance objectives and is by far the most capable aerial refueler ever built. Future operators are eager to begin training on it.

However, you might not have gotten that impression from some of the news coverage that accompanied the announcement. The Chicago Tribune, Boeing’s hometown newspaper, ran a headline describing Pegasus as “flawed.” The Seattle Times, the biggest newspaper in the area where the plane is assembled, said in its own headline that the Air Force was accepting the tanker with “serious misgivings.”

The reality is that if the KC-46A had serious deficiencies, the Air Force wouldn’t be accepting it. There are two issues that need to be addressed. First, a remote vision system in the cockpit slightly distorts the view of planes receiving fuel when the Sun creates glare or shadows – a difficulty that can be rectified by shifting the direction of the planes to alter how light hits them. Second, the Air Force did not provide an adequate refueling specification for the “boom” that delivers fuel to receiving planes, and as a result one type of aircraft that the service has been trying to retire for years has difficulty receiving fuel.

These are not show-stoppers. The Air Force and Boeing have identified how to address them, with the company paying to fix the vision system and the service paying to refine the boom. But some of the news accounts focused almost exclusively on these two issues, creating the impression that the tanker program is “troubled.”

A KC-46A tanker refuels an A-10 tank-killer during developmental testing. The Air Force says it will pay for modifications to the refueling boom so that the A-10 is more easily refueled, and acknowledges Boeing was fully compliant with its contractual obligations on that front.

Wikipedia

That’s a favorite adjective that is used by journalists to describe everything from the F-35 joint strike fighter to the Navy’s new aircraft carrier to the Army’s battlefield networks. Reporters write stories that way because it’s a lot easier to describe one or two problems than the dozens of ways in which the programs meet or exceed expectations. Bad news tends to attract a bigger audience than good news, so much of the good news never reaches the public.

That certainly is the case with coverage of Pegasus. I know this because Boeing is a contributor to my think tank, and as a result I have followed every twist and turn in the tanker program since it was first awarded in 2011. I also know it because I had a lengthy conversation on Thursday with a senior Air Force official who laid out in precise terms where the tanker program stands. With an eye to putting Pegasus in proper perspective, here are five facts worth keeping in mind about the Air Force’s new tanker.

Pegasus meets its performance objectives. The Air Force identified nine “key performance parameters” when it began the tanker effort, and KC-46A meets all of them. It can transfer fuel to Air Force, Navy, Marine and allied planes at a rate in excess of 1,000 gallons per minute. It can refuel multiple planes at the same time. It can carry up to 114 passengers or 18 cargo pallets while conducting refueling. It can conduct large aeromedical evacuations. It is comprehensively protected against hostile aircraft and missiles, chem-bio weapons, and cyber attack. These features and others have been repeatedly demonstrated in 3,800 hours of flight testing during which diverse Air Force and Navy planes received fuel while flying.

Remaining issues are limited and fixable. The two unexpected issues that turned up in developmental testing were inadequate boom pressure when refueling the A-10 “Warthog” tank-killer and glare-induced distortion in the remote vision system. The boom issue will have to be resolved by modifying hardware to a different specification than that in the original contract, but the Air Force acknowledges Boeing was not at fault there. The vision-system issue will require hardware and software fixes implemented over a period of years, but the Air Force is confident it has precisely identified what changes are necessary, and those have been incorporated into an agreement with Boeing.

Boeing can easily pay for the fixes. The remote vision system is a refinement not available in older tankers, which require an airman to sit in the back of the plane and guide the refueling line to receiving planes. KC-46A puts the refueling specialist in the cockpit, relying on stereo vision provided by several cameras to direct the boom. The distortion generated by glare and shadows can be corrected by shifting the orientation of planes, but that is inconvenient and the service wants a permanent fix probably involving both hardware and software modifications. It isn’t clear what the cost will be but it is likely to be modest relative to Boeing revenues and the $100 billion+ long-term value of the tanker franchise. The company is eager to implement a fix so it can move ahead with selling more tankers to domestic and foreign customers.

The joint force needs new refuelers fast. Most of the tankers in the current Air Force fleet are gas-guzzling military versions of the old Boeing 707 airframe subject to corrosion, metal fatigue and parts obsolescence. It has a smaller complement of DC-10 derivatives built in the 1980s, but those too consume a lot of fuel, and are not optimized for typical refueling missions. The Air Force wants to retire the whole fleet before costly structural modifications become necessary due to age, but that requires expeditious introduction of Pegasus. There is no Plan B, and the Air Force is responsible for aerial refueling of all joint aircraft, not to mention those of allies and other overseas partners.

Pilots need to begin training on the plane. If KC-46A were significantly flawed, the Air Mobility Command that operates U.S. tankers and airlifters would not be interested in receiving it. In fact, the senior Air Force official I talked to Thursday said the command very much wants to begin training pilots on the plane, because it recognizes Pegasus is the future of aerial refueling. Not only will it save money on fuel and repair bills, but it has already demonstrated it is a more versatile, resilient airframe than legacy tankers. Nobody knows how long the antiquated tankers in the existing fleet will be safe to fly. By the time age compels their retirement though, Air Mobility Command needs hundreds of KC-46As in the force refueling the joint fleet.

That latter point deserves emphasis. Air Force leaders decided years ago that they want more than the 179 Pegasus airframes subsumed in the current KC-46A program. In fact, they want over 400, to assure economies of scale and interoperability across the refueling fleet. The long track record of the Boeing 767 jetliner from which Pegasus is derived gives them confidence that they have selected the right airframe for a next-generation tanker, and nobody doubts the centrality of aerial refueling to future air operations. So whatever the state of play may be at any given moment in the KC-46A program, it is important to recognize that our military’s future global reach and power will ride on the wings of Pegasus.